Many years ago when printing was in its infancy, there were no
established rules for highlighting certain features of text. Since
color was not available, capitalization became a means for emphasis.
For example, in 1626Sir Robert
Cotton gave a speech in Parliament regarding debasement of coin and
his speech was eventually reprinted in 1651. Examination of just the
first page of this document published in 1651 shows almost a random
pattern for capitalization.

A student of the
law may visit a typical law library and possibly find one of the the oldest sets of books
common in such
libraries: Howell's State Trials, which is an 18th century publication
that reprinted historic, old English cases regarding a wide variety of
topics. Review of this page of Howell's
State Trials shows that even in 1629, the names of cases (their
"styles") were capitalized.

When the United States Constitution was ratified and Congress started
operating via that constitution, the first laws were printed in
newspapers and later archived. By 1845, Congress decided to print the
laws it passed in a publication officially known as the United States
Statutes at Large. Review of just a few pages from the first volume of
this work, Vol. 1,
Statutes at Large,
demonstrates frequent use of capitalization for many words appearing in
print.

The first
reporter for the United States Supreme Court was Dallas, who also
happened to be the reporter for the Pennsylvania courts. He thus
published in the first volumes of the U.S. Supreme Court reporter
decisions of Pennsylvania courts. Subsequent reporters like West
Publishing simply recopied Dallas's reports when they published theirs.
Here in this file,U.S. Supreme
Court, you may review sample pages of the first volume of West's
Supreme Court reporter. Please notice that the styles of cases and many
other items were capitalized. See also similar items for Alabama.

As seen above, court cases were printed
for more than a hundred years before the 1780s with capitalized styles.
Below, please find cases for the years indicated where styles of cases
were capitalized:

The items appearing above were obtained from some historical research
materials found in my office and thus may not be of the finest
reproduction quality (some of these copies are themselves 20 years
old). Nonetheless, it is obvious that for hundreds of years,
styles of cases and other legal materials were frequently capitalized
for purposes of emphasis. The custom of capitalized styles of
cases continues even today.

In recent years, there
has been promoted an argument that capitalized styles of cases means
something sinister. Some advocates of this argument identify the
source for this contention: a book written by
a
man named Berkhimer. Allegedly in this book, the author states that a
"nom
de guerre" is a "war name" symbolized by a given name being written in
capital
letters. I have tried to find this passage in this book but have been
unable
to do so. The argument contends that because of events in 1933, we have
been
made "enemies" and government indicates our status as enemies by the
nom
de guerre. If this is true, then why have the styles of the decisions
of
the United States Supreme Court since its establishment been in caps?
This argument has gotten lots of people in trouble. For example, a
number of people such as Al Thompson and Keith Anderson have defended
themselves against criminal charges with this
argument, but have been thrown into jail nonetheless. I have not even
seen a decent brief on
this
issue which was predicated upon cases you can find in an ordinary law
library.

In any event, several courts have rejected this argument:

1. Jaeger v.
Dubuque
County, 880 F.Supp. 640 (N.D.Iowa 1995)2. United States v. Heard,
952
F.Supp. 329 (N.D.W.Va. 1996)3. Boyce v. C.I.R., 72
T.C.M. ¶
1996-439 ("an objection to the spelling of petitioners' names in
capital
letters because they are not 'fictitious entities'" was rejected)4. United States v. Washington,
947 F.Supp. 87, 92 (S.D.N.Y. 1996)("Finally, the defendant contends
that the
Indictment must be dismissed because 'Kurt Washington,' spelled out in
capital
letters, is a fictitious name used by the Government to tax him
improperly
as a business, and that the correct spelling and presentation of his
name
is 'Kurt Washington.' This contention is baseless")5. United States v. Klimek,
952
F.Supp. 1100 (E.D.Pa. 1997)6. In re Gdowik, 228 B.R.
481,
482 (S.D.Fla. 1997)(claim that "the use of his name JOHN E GDOWIK is an
'illegal
misnomer' and use of said name violates the right to his lawful status"
was
rejected)7. Russell v. United States,
969
F.Supp. 24, 25 (W.D. Mich. 1997)("Petitioner * * * claims because his
name
is in all capital letters on the summons, he is not subject to the
summons";
this argument held frivolous)8. United States v. Lindbloom,
97-2
U.S.T.C. ¶ 50650 (W.D. Wash. 1997)("In this submission, Mr.
Lindbloom
states that he and his wife are not proper defendants to this action
because
their names are not spelled with all capital letters as indicated in
the
civil caption." The CAPS argument and the "refused for fraud"
contention
were rejected)9. Rosenheck & Co., Inc. v.
United
States, 79 A.F.T.R.2d (RIA) 2715 (N.D. Ok. 1997)("Kostich has made
the
disingenuous argument the IRS documents at issue here fail to properly
identify
him as the taxpayer. Defendant Kostich contends his ‘Christian name' is
Walter
Edward, Kostich, Junior and since the IRS documents do not contain his
‘Christian
name,' he is not the person named in the Notice of Levy. The Court
expressly
finds Defendant WALTER EDWARD KOSTICH JR. is the person identified in
the
Notice of Levy, irrespective of the commas, capitalization of letters,
or
other alleged irregularities Kostich identifies as improper. Similarly,
the
Court's finding applies to the filed pleadings in this matter")10. United States v. Weatherley,
12 F.Supp.2d 469 (E.D.Pa. 1998)11. United
States
v. Frech, 149 F.3d 1192 (10th Cir. 1998)("Defendants' assertion
that
the capitalization of their names in court documents constitutes
constructive fraud, thereby depriving the district court of
jurisdiction and venue, is
without any basis in law or fact").

One of the persistent
myths among political dissidents is that such usages as initial or
complete capitalization of names indicates different legal entities or
a different legal status for
the entity. They see a person's name sometimes written in all caps, and
sometimes
written only in initial caps, and attribute a sinister intent to this
difference.
They also attach special meanings to the ways words may be capitalized
or
abbreviated in founding documents, such as constitutions or the early
writings
of the Founders.

Such people seem to
resist all efforts to explain that such conventions have no legal
significance whatsoever,
that they are just ways to emphasize certain kinds of type, to make it
easier
for the reader to scan the documents quickly and organize the contents
in
his mind.

They also seem to go to
enormous lengths
looking for dictionaries or court rules to tell them what such
typography
means, without ever seeming to find what they are looking for, other
than
the actual usages themselves in important court cases.

Well, there is an authoritative
reference, the one used by courts and lawyers all over the world.
It is The Bluebook: A Uniform
System of
Citation, compiled by the editors of the Columbia Law Review, the
Harvard
Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law
Review,
and The Yale Law Journal, 16th ed. 1996. Copies can be obtained from
any
law book store or by writing The Harvard Law Review Association,
Gannett
House, 1511 Massachusetts Av., Cambridge, MA 02138.

To explain how typographic
conventions originated, and what they mean, I am reminded of the story
of the first grader
whose teacher became alarmed by the crayon drawings of one of her
students.
She called in the school counselor and she became alarmed, so she
called
in a child psychologist, who also became alarmed in turn. Fearing for
the
mental health of the child, they called in her parents.

The parents, now themselves
concerned about their child, arrived at the meeting. "What
happened?", the father
said. The school staff persons showed his daughter's art work to him
and
to his wife. The father looked the drawings over, and said, "Look
pretty
good to me. I couldn't do that well at that age."

"But the colors!" the teacher
said. "She does everything in black, grey, and brown!" said the
counselor. "It seems
morbid" said the psychologist.

So the father said, "Why don't
we ask my daughter?" The school staff looked aghast at this
audacious suggestion,
but, not having any better ideas, they asked the little girl to
come
in.

She saw her parents, and the
school staffers, all gathered around her art work, looking concerned,
and became a bit concerned herself. But her father knew what to say.
"Hon, your teachers want to know why you are drawing everything in
black, grey, and brown."

"I gave most of my crayons to
the other kids when they used theirs up", she said. "Black, grey, and
brown are
the only colors I have left."

Lawyers continued to hand write
legal documents long after typewriters were invented. As a profession,
they tend to be the last to adopt new technology. When things were hand
written, they
had only a few ways to highlight words. They could use block printed
characters
instead of cursive, or they could underline. Typesetters converted the
block
printed characters to all caps, sometimes with different font sizes,
and
the underlined words to italics.

As lawyers and legal staff
began to
use typewriters, they could not conveniently underline, and they didn't
have
italic fonts, so putting words in all caps was about the only way they
had
to show emphasis. Judges began rewarding lawyers (or so they thought)
with
better decisions if they put some words, like the names of parties, in
all
caps, to make it easier for overworked judges to quickly scan through
many
pages of pleadings and make sense of them.

Then computers came along.
People started using them to produce legal documents. But a lot of them
only had capital letters on their printers, or did not distinguish
between upper and
lower case. Programs in COBOL are examples of this. It was also found
that
it was easier to read words printed in all caps on forms, and to
distinguish the newly-printed words from the pre-printed words on the
forms.

In the meantime, there were
advances in typesetting typography. People became able to print special
symbols, bold
face, different fonts and sizes, superscripts, underlined, and colors.
And
with that came demands for using differences in typography to highlight
words
in legal documents, including treatises, law review articles,
briefs,
etc.

Now we have personal computers
and laser printers that can do anything the typesetter can do, and
legal workers are now under pressure to produce nicely composed legal
documents according to the same conventions that typesetters are asked
to use.

This explosion of choices could
have led to confusion, so the various courts have established rules for
how they
want legal documents prepared, and these rules are matched by similar
but
sometimes different rules of the major law review editors.

Basically, they have settled on
three font styles: upper-and-lower case Roman, Italics, and Roman
all-caps with larger point size for initials. Of course, if these are
saved as ASCII text
files, the Italics are lost, and the all-caps only show up as a single
point
size. Sometimes, to show Italics, as a legacy of underscoring, the
words
to be italicized are surrounded by underscore characters, as we do in
the
text above in the text version of this article.

The Bluebook calls for
different typographics
for the same kinds of things in different places. For example, a case
cite
like Marbury v. Madison would be italicized in the body of a
law review
article, but not in a footnote. Why? Who knows. It doesn't have to make
sense.
It's what they do. If you submit it using different conventions, the
editors
will change it to their journal's conventions.

The important thing to
remember, however,
is that there is no legal significance to the typography of a name,
other
than how well it distinguishes one object from others with which it
might
be confused. It is the object that matters. A misspelling is a
"scrivener's
error". Doesn't changed anything. Just needs to be corrected. Caps,
complete
or initial, don't mean anything. Just whatever the writer thought
would
aid the reader to get through the document quickly and with a minimum
of
confusion.

The nom de guerre
position
is one rabidly advocated by Wrong Way Law. It is all based on hype
and
emotions; the speakers who advocate this argument know how to push the
emotional
"hot buttons" at patriot pep rallies. I have reviewed the "best" briefs
regarding
this issue and they are all trash. Yet I continue to see people call
themselves
"John, of smith," "Jack: Smith," etc., and I just simply conclude that
such
parties have attended a Wrong Way Law seminar and have accepted a pack
of
lies. Further, it is remarkable that all the people who believe this
idea
have never checked it out; they just accept it because some patriot
guru
claimed it was correct.